1. Technical Field
This description generally relates to the field of electronic packaging, and in particular to management of the thermal output of packaged semiconductor electronics.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advances in semiconductor processing techniques have enabled increased circuit density in semiconductor die. One consequence of increased circuit density is that the density of connection pads on the die's active face has also increased, making the interface between the die and external circuitry more crowded. This limitation is frequently overcome using wafer level packaging, which includes printing a redistribution layer directly on the active face of a die, the redistribution layer spanning both the die face and an encapsulant material adjacent to the die. By distributing the connection pads over a wider area, a ball grid array (BGA) can be used to complete the interface between the die and a PC board or other external interface. A side effect of solving the connection pad interface problem is that the concentration of heat needing to be dissipated from wafer level packaged devices is higher.